China approves AVS codec
Posted by Mark Nelson on 8th December 2005 | Permanent Link
The Peoples Daily tells us that China’s Ministry of Information has approved the AVS video coding standard. This proprietary standard is an attempt to sidestep the increasingly large burden of royalties that China pays for MPEG-2 patent licensing.
At this time the AVS standard is set for internal deployment, for both streaming video and perhaps playable discs. Whether this technology shows up in the export market is still to be determined.
An interesting note at the end of the article:
In its 11th Five-Year Plan, China stated clearly that the development of digital audio-visual sectors would be given priority up to 2010.
The Five-Year Plan has changed quite a bit if it now dictates video codec standards!